


the partridge wife (and other stories)

by stiction



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: F/F, F/M, Past Relationship(s), Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-27
Updated: 2017-05-27
Packaged: 2018-11-05 15:30:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11016285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stiction/pseuds/stiction
Summary: “I have a lot of stories,” Alex says. “But without a script they tend to come out sounding like episodes of The X Files. Bad ones, too--more like, likeTeso Dos BichosthanTwo Fathers.”“A storyteller who can’t tell stories,” Strand says. His tone is ambiguous but he passes her the bottle when he says it so she decides not to take it personally.---Hellatus Swap 2016 gift for seraphimsansa on tumblr.





	the partridge wife (and other stories)

Felix Reagan starts work in a logging camp in his 20’s, and stays until his 38th birthday, when a hasty treefall costs him his right eye. He spends a week with the camp’s doctor before they ship him off to a hospital further inland.

He stays there for a fortnight, fighting infection, and on the fourth day he meets Beatrice Simard. She’s Catholic, a nurse, and when he leaves the hospital, she leaves with him. They move across the provinces over the course of a year, until Beatrice finds work in another hospital in British Columbia and Felix is hired by the Forest Service. They buy a house and have two sons who both grow up to be teachers. One of them gets married in the 70s and has one daughter, who stays with her grandparents at least three times a week until she’s old enough to stay home alone.  

Felix finds that she takes to the woods well enough once she learns how to walk. She likes to point at things and ask him what they are, and she likes to splash in the puddles. He makes sure she knows how to climb trees and start fires.

In the summer, the whole family goes to a lake house for at least a week: he and Beatrice, Nathan and his dogs, Jacob and Ada and their daughter Alexandra.

As Alex grows up he takes her for longer and longer hikes. She joins the Scouts when she’s nine and complains about how she hasn’t learned anything new yet. She starts bringing books to the cabin and asks her to read to him. At night they build bonfires and crowd around to tell stories.

Here is where, once the fire grows dim and the adults have had their beer, Felix tells her his stories from the Newfoundland logging camps. She draws her legs up onto her lawn chair and listens with rapt eyes while he describes the shapes of the things he saw in those forests. She shivers at all the right moments in the stories and saves her questions until the end.

He tells her more over the years, until he runs out of his own and starts sharing the stories of the Mi’kmaq men who worked at and traded with the camps. Alex doesn’t lose patience when he starts to repeat himself and lose track of the plot.

Beatrice passes away in their bed the summer before Alex starts high school, and the first thing he does after her funeral is sit down at his desk and begin the long work of writing his stories down. It takes nearly four years to finish, since Felix stops often and starts rarely. He finishes it finally in April of 1998, a month after his eighty-second birthday and six months before his remaining eye clouds with a cataract and leaves him blind.

Jacob, who is more patient than his brother and better with computers, copies what he’s written, proofreads it and has one of his colleagues make it into a thin, sturdily bound book.

Alex cries when she opens it at her high-school graduation party and immediately promises to take it with her to her school in the States.

Nine months later, Felix Reagan has a brain aneurysm in his sleep and does not wake up. His eldest son calls his own daughter the next day. She emails her professors and catches the first train to Vancouver.

On the four-hour ride across the border, Alex grips her grandfather’s book tight in her lap. She doesn’t read them that night because she’s not sure if she’ll still hear the stories in her grandfather’s voice or not.

She doesn’t read them that night because she’s not sure which would be worse.

* * *

 

By her sophomore year in college, Alex has actual friends, not just _hey-you’re-in-my-psych-class-can-I-borrow-your-notes_ friends.

There’s Tim, who is in all of Alex’s history classes and makes her watch Twin Peaks with him on Wednesdays when he sits night desk. Amalia is a transfer student who helps Alex rack up two drug and alcohol strikes in her third semester at UW. Sun-hee is a junior A/V major who starts and finishes at least one short film project a week, and headhunts her actors from the undergrad communications department. Nic is in nearly all of her comms classes, and interned with her last summer at Pacific Northwest Studios--they pinky-swore over shots in August that they would apply again in May.

Tim and Sun-hee come barging into her room at 11:30 on a Friday, where Alex is still napping before her one o’clock class, and wake her up by jumping on her bed.

“We're going camping!” Sun-hee shouts.

“What?”

“Camping!” Tim shouts.

Alex rubs her eyes. Sun-hee is draped across her back.

“I have class at one,” she says, but already the idea of leaving campus is winning her over.

“Who do you have?” Sun-hee asks. She leans up to ruffle Alex’s bedhead and poke at the wrinkles her pillow left on her cheeks.

“Nemison.” She did laundry last Sunday so her lightweight pants are clean. Her hiking boots are under the bed, shoved behind a crate of books.

Sun-hee snorts. “She wouldn’t notice if you came to class naked. Skip it, we’re going camping!”

“Who’s coming?” Alex asks, even though she’s already decided to go.

“Me and Tim, so far. Who do you wanna bring?”

Alex stretches her arms up and yawns. “Can we bring Nic?”

“As long as he brings his bong,” Tim says, and Sun-hee kicks him.

“Of course he will,” Alex says, already laughing. “We should bring Amalia, too.”

“Which one is she?” Tim asks. “The scary one?”

Sun-hee kicks him again.

“The hot, scary one?” he tries again.

“That’s the one,” Alex says. She buries her smile in the crook of her arm.

“Does she know _how_ to camp?” Tim asks.

It’s a fair question. Alex settles on: “Maybe?”

Sun-hee rolls off of Alex’s back and whispers something in Tim’s ear that makes him laugh.

“Bring her,” he says, hopping off of her bed. “We’re leaving at 12:30. Pack for one night and bring all the alcohol you have.”

She salutes, still face-down, and waits until they leave to get up and email Amalia and Nic. Alex is a fast packer, especially for a short trip. She has socks, pants, shirts, underwear in her bag in under ten minutes. Her bedhead is about what her normal hair is supposed to look like, so Alex spends thirty seconds at the bathroom mirror fixing her eyeliner and is out the door by noon.

She picks Nic and Amalia up at the coffee shop in the student union. Amalia’s dark lipstick leaves a mark on the lid of her cup and as they walk to the parking lot Alex tries not to think about how it would taste--thick as wax and vaguely bitter.

Tim's car is universally regarded as an absolute piece of shit. They all know it, but only Tim is allowed to say it. Nic takes a moment in the parking lot to stare fondly at the wood paneling and chipped blue paint before they put their things in the trunk. Sun-hee is sprawled out on the hood of the car with her shades on, smoking.

"Nic," Tim says, nodding from his spot in the driver’s seat. "Amalia. You guys ready to head out into the great unknown?"

"How unknown could it be?" Amalia asks. She passes by the door Nic holds open for her and perches on the hood next to Sun-hee, who offers her the cigarette without a word.

Tim cranes his head around to look at Alex and mouths "Told you so."

"Where are we going, exactly?" Nic asks. He shifts his hold on the door so that it looks more like he just happened to end up there and less like Amalia didn’t notice him.

"My friends and I have a spot near the Sound. Should be pretty quiet, even this time of year. Nobody really goes there except to drink and be stupid."

"Is that our plan?" Sun-hee calls, gracelessly puffing smoke. "Drinking and being stupid?"

"Maybe some hiking," Tim says.

"Sounds good to me."

Nic shrugs and gives up his post at the door to slide into the backseat. Alex waits until Amalia and Sun-hee are finished and lets Amalia take the middle seat. Sun-hee gets shotgun, because Tim likes her taste in music the best.

"Everyone piss already?" Tim asks, and with the varying noises of assent, he starts the car and peels out of the lot.

Sun-hee digs a tape out from under the passenger side seat and puts it in. Alex has heard this one a few times before, when she tagged along after the two of them on late-night beer runs and smoke breaks behind the third sketchiest bowling alley in town.

Tim's window is rolled down and the wind is warm from the sun. Amalia's knee is touching her leg, her elbow nudging Alex's side whenever she makes a sly comment in their conversation. A glass bottle appears from her backpack and they pass it around the car until Amalia's lipstick has gone faded and Alex is more familiar with the taste of it than she has any right to be.

Everything is pleasantly soft when they reach the campsite. Nic scrambles out of the car first, wandering off to go to the bathroom, and the rest of them stumble out to stretch their legs one by one.

"Set-up first?" Alex suggests. The clearing is big enough that they can make a rough circle with their tents on one half and the car on the other, with enough room in the middle for a relatively big fire.

Nic tries to talk Amalia through setting up his tent, until they both get too frustrated and Alex takes her place, laughing. Her own hands are steady with tent poles and nylon. She hammers the stakes into the ground with Nic's mallet and soon enough it's sturdy.

"First-time camper?" Tim asks Amalia. She's moved back to sit on the hood of the car again, her legs dangling and the glass bottle back in her hand.

"I prefer to spend my time indoors," she says. "Less bugs."

"Too cold in Russia?" he jibes, and her answering smile has an impressive amount of teeth.

"Too warm in America," Amalia counters. She shakes another cigarette out of her pack and lights it.

While the sun is still up, they take a slow, level walk through the woods. The trail isn't official, but there's a path beaten between the trees, and Tim knows it well enough to lead.

Nic catches Amalia's arm when she stumbles, and Sun-hee throws handfuls of leaves up into the air over Tim and Alex's heads. Alex feels almost too warm, rolls the cuffs of her flannel shirt up to her elbows and rakes her hand through her hair.

"You look like a baby chicken," Amalia says, dropping back to tease her fingers over the top of Alex's head.

Alex's heart jumps again--she only drops her head and smiles when Amalia murmurs something in Russian.

They circle back to the campsite eventually, Sun-hee making crowns out of the leaves and flowers she's found on the forest floor. Nic is wearing one, his hair loose around his shoulders, and Amalia's mangled attempt was good enough for Tim.

Alex starts the fire and Tim unpacks his blankets from the trunk so they have somewhere to sit that isn't damp while Nic packs a bowl for the five of them.

By the time it's all smoked, the sun is nearly set, the fire is roaring, and Alex lays back against Amalia's legs to watch the stars come out. Amalia's hand lands on her forehead, lightly at first, and then moves back to run through her hair. Her fingertips tease at the crown of Alex's head and Alex stifles a small shiver.

Nic hums quietly on Amalia's other side and Alex catches the rhythm and hums along. Something crinkles, Amalia chuckles and then shakes a plastic bag next to Alex's ear.

"Pretzel?" she asks.

"God yes."

Amalia presses a handful of mini twists into Alex's grasping palm and Alex eats them happily.

"It's so dark," Sun-hee sighs. "I like camping a lot better here."

"Kinda spooky, though," Nic says. "People see all kinds of things in the woods, especially in Washington."

"Oh, yes. The Bigfoot." Sun-hee stomps her feet on the ground and laughs.

"Laugh all you want, but I swear to god my uncle Mike has a picture of it," Tim butts in. "He saw it on a hunting trip when he was my age. Said it smelled like death."

"That's so silly," Amalia says. Her hand stops moving through Alex's hair, which is sad, but Amalia leans up against Alex when she shifts to sit back up again, so that's better. "Bigfoot. What is it even supposed to be?"

Nic lights up.

"Please, no," Alex groans, reaching past Amalia to smack at his shoulder. "Don't get him started. He'll talk about Bigfoot all night. All night."

"I'm not scared," Sun-hee says, waving a chain of leaves at Tim. "I have heard much scarier stories than Bigfoot."

"Are we telling ghost stories now?" Amalia asks. While she talks her hand falls down against the ground and her fingers brush Alex's. Without thinking, Alex moves to take them between hers. Amalia doesn't move away, only readjusts so that the angle is comfortable. "I know many ghost stories."

"You do?" Nic asks. If she didn’t already know, now would be the moment Alex realized what the note of awe in his voice was.

"My grandmother's house was haunted," Tim offers solemnly. "I used to see things when I stayed there on the weekends. Black shapes and shit like that.

Amalia’s head is warm on Alex’s shoulder, and she thinks of her grandfather’s book. Of the little things that lived in the forest and liked to steal from the loggers if they didn’t leave small dishes of fruit and meat outside the mess. For a moment she nearly speaks, but then Amalia’s hand shifts in hers until she’s touching the inside of Alex’s thigh. Alex can feel it through her jeans, the small warmth of Amalia’s fingers.

She loses the thought, and then the fire flares bright as Tim and Nic feed some more branches into it. Sun-hee scoots closer to the fire and starts telling a story about some friends of hers that used to ferry over from Japan to see her and go to parties. Alex misses the rest of it in the slow stroke of Amalia’s fingers over a distressed patch in her jeans.

Amalia tenses suddenly and Alex blinks out of her daze long enough to hear the phrase ‘hair soaked with blood’ and decide that she’d rather not hear the rest.

And then Tim is talking, his story flowing less smoothly than Sun-hee’s had, and Amalia leans over to whisper into Alex’s ear. Alex nods because she doesn’t trust her voice. Amalia leans the other way to talk to Nic, and then she’s helping Alex to her feet and leading her to the black and blue tent Alex’s parents gave her for her nineteenth birthday.

She can hear the others by the fire still, the low hum of Tim’s voice and Sun-hee’s bright laugh. Nic butts in and all of them laugh together, and Alex is busy unbuttoning her flannel when Amalia wraps her arms around her waist and sets her chin on Alex’s shoulder. She smells like cheap menthols and Alex rests her hands on Amalia’s wrists.

“Am I wrong?” Amalia asks, and Alex shakes her head, murmurs no.

The press of Amalia’s lips to the back of her neck is oddly cool, warming only when she opens her mouth to bite below Alex’s jaw.

“Let _me_ tell you a story,” Amalia whispers. Alex swallows her gasp and hopes the crackling of the fire outside masks it.

Amalia speaks softly, tells her a hushed story about two girls and a snowstorm, about spending hours huddled under her comforter talking through the palms of their hands. Alex hangs on each word and on the thin warmth of Amalia’s fingers at the backs of her arms. The story lays them down on her spread-out sleeping bag.

Amalia walks her fingers up Alex’s arm to her bare neck. When Amalia pulls her in close, when her fading lipstick rubs off on Alex’s mouth--the spell finally breaks. Alex wakes from a deep haze and reaches for Amalia with grasping hands.

* * *

 

It’s tradition in the Pacific Northwest family to go camping every July.

Not camping, exactly: Terry and Paul rent out some cabins outside Seattle and everyone still sleeps in a real bed for the weekend. There’s electricity and hot water, and Alex just doesn’t have it in herself to consider that camping.

It helps the interns and veterans break the ice, and gets everyone out of the city for a well needed rest. Some of their best ideas have evolved from conversations during these weekend trips--Alex remembers sitting by the fire with Paul and Nic three summers ago and dreaming up a podcast about unusual occupations.

Inevitably someone, normally Nic, brings a sleeve of red Solo cups and a few balls, and after a drink or three Alex gets roped into defending their status as station beer pong champions. They’ve held it for seven years so far, even as the new interns get better and better.

Her _vacation_ is still fresh in her mind while she packs for this year’s trip.

Alex went back to work two weeks ago, spent nearly half an hour in the mirror before she left layering foundation under her eyes to cover the dark circles only to lock herself in a bathroom stall at work, crying all of it off.

She waited long after she stopped shaking and then just sat, bent over, until her phone buzzed, a text from Nic offering a coffee break like an olive branch.

Her face didn’t look as bad as she expected in the mirror; most of her makeup was in place, and Nic wouldn’t be surprised by how tired she looked anyway. Paper towels and water took care of the streaked mascara and Alex took care of the rest.

Nic had her coffee already. He waited until she sat down and then slid half of his lox bagel across the table to her.

“First day back is always the hardest,” he said, and she had the sudden memory of Nic sitting at his desk with his head in his arms, so tired and thin that she thought he would disappear into the forest again at any moment.

“Amen,” she murmured. The bagel was fresh, the coffee hot, and Nic gripped her hand so tightly on the elevator ride to their floor later that she felt herself become a little more solid.

Later he texted her: _up for defending our championship next weekend?_

She read it and took a few minutes to remember: bottles of local brew beer and her hands sticky with melted marshmallow, ducking off into the trees with Nic and a couple neatly rolled joints, weaving through the lawn chairs to the long white table where they set up the cups and the roster.

 _Can’t let the interns get too cocky_ , she tapped back, and searched through her phone for last year’s picture of them standing on the table in station t-shirts with the sleeves cut off, triumphantly shotgunning a can of PBR each.

So Alex hunts through her drawers for the cutoff shirt and the pair of shorts she’s had since college and packs them too, next to her sunglasses and sandals and sunblock. She rides down with Nic and two of the interns straight out of training. One of the interns goes on a long tangent about the newest episode of Tanis; Alex watches the tense line of Nic’s shoulders rise until she steps in, steers the discussion back towards camping.

The other intern, Eric or Eli or something like that, meets Alex’s eyes in the rearview mirror and smiles in sympathy. She lets him pick the music next. He becomes her favorite new intern in the next half hour, half by virtue of his good taste in music, and half for the fact that he keeps his mouth shut.

Terry waves them over once they pull in and unload.

“You’re in 4A,” he shouts, pointing the neck of his beer towards the cabin in the middle. “It’s almost time for dinner so hurry up.”

Dinner is the same every year: hot dogs and burgers, vegan substitutes for both. Paul makes killer coleslaw, and a few of the senior staff bring their own sides. Nic made chocolate chip cookies from a tub of dough, and Alex has a huge shopping bag stuffed with graham crackers and marshmallows, chocolate bars and peanut butter cups.

By the time Alex drops her stuff and pockets her phone, Terry’s shouting first call for the grill. Nic meets her at her chair with two beers in hand and they watch the interns knock elbows by the condiments. Eli (his name is for sure Eli, she’s learned), sees them watching and gives an awkward little wave.

“Cute kid,” Alex says, and Nic nods, and they share a sudden moment of horrified realization that 24 year olds seem like kids now.

Nic’s burgers are piled high with toppings and Alex watches him eat, more than a little in awe that he manages to do it without spilling on his shirt. Her black bean burger smells amazing, but the smell of food still turns her stomach.

She picks at it for a moment, spears a chunk of potato salad instead. It tastes sour.

“How long did it take your appetite to come back?” she asks, when Nic finishes his first sandwich and moves on to the next.

He shrugs and waits to swallow his bite. “I’m not sure it has, to be honest. I just kind of made myself start eating again one day and went from there.”

Alex raises the burger from her plate. It still _smells_ good, is the thing, and she _wants_ to want to eat it.

The first bite is just as difficult as she thought it would be. It’s hard to chew at first. Once she started sleeping her dinners became smaller. Less complex. A bowl of iceberg lettuce with a handful of sad cheese shreds and some suspiciously lumpy honey mustard dressing. Some cereal that she forgets about until it’s bran mush and raisins.

Chewing protein seems like such an effort now. She makes it through two or three bites before she has to take a break and sip her beer.

Nic gives her a long, soft look and a gentle kick on the shin.

Alex ends up throwing her burger out when Nic isn’t looking and they wander towards one of the bonfires with backup beers stuffed in the pockets of Nic’s dumb cargo shorts.

The beer pong tournament is in full swing by now, and Alex is buzzing nicely by the time they get in for their first game. Nic carries them through the first half of the game; the interns are only trailing by two cups when Alex hits her stride and starts sinking her shots. She gets a trick shot in after one of the interns fumbles the ball too, and their team (Blandcouver Bi) moves up.

It’s in the second round that Alex’s stomach starts to cramp. There are cold aches running down her arms and the backs of her legs, bad enough that her knees get weak and her shirt is soaked with sweat. She finishes her beer and holds onto the edge of the table until the wave of dizziness passes.

“You okay?” Nic murmurs, knocking shoulders with her while the interns across the table bicker about the rules.

“On my feet,” she manages. “Just kinda hot.”

He looks at her then, while her mouth tries to hold a smile, and Alex feels the pit of her stomach drop, the taste of bile in the back of her throat. The chatty intern sinks her shot. Alex turns and walks, very very calmly, to her cabin. Her feet are covered in grass stains and gritty dirt and exhaustion drags her to her knees against the edge of the tub.

For a moment she imagines clambering over the side and turning the water on until the heat is leached from her skin. Instead she drags herself back up to the sink and lets the tapwater run over her face.

Alex drinks from her cupped hands and slowly, the rush of blood in her ears goes quiet.

When she looks up into the mirror, her face is still flushed. It’s clean, though, and the image of her reflection doesn’t go blurry, so she counts that as a success.

Nic is sitting on one of the beds in the cabin. The label on his beer bottle is picked off and pilled on the floor.

“You alive?” he asks when she comes out, and he looks so worried that she just nods.

Her fingers wipe at the water near her temples, push the damp hair back over her ears. “Did you forfeit?”

Nic pulls a face.

“Shit. They’re gonna get cocky now.”

“Alex, I don’t--” Nic stares at the floor and kicks the edge of the rug. “I don’t care about the beer pong, you know.”

“I know,” she says. It feels better to know that the tightness in her stomach is just anxiety now, not some strange illness. “I promise, Nic, I’m fine. It was just… too much sun. Not enough water.”

He looks at her doubtfully, but he agrees to come back outside with her. The woods are dark, the sun set, and the bonfires are nearly as tall as she is. She lingers at Nic’s side while he fields questions from a couple of interns. Her cup is full of organic fruit juice, courtesy of Paul and his gentle, parental care.

Eli the intern sidles up next to her, carefully skewering a marshmallow onto a forked branch.

“Want a s’more?” he says. He doesn’t quite meet her eyes, and still speaks quietly, and Alex is overall too fond to say no.

And it tastes good when she bites into it. Her stomach is calm and the marshmallow is hot and the chocolate is melting so quickly that it coats her fingers.

"Thanks," she says. He smiles, puts two more marshmallows on without having to ask.

Paul wanders over to check on her and ends up getting drawn into their conversation about factory versus family farming. Mostly he just shrugs and gestures to the bottle of cold-pressed juice he’s carrying.

“I don’t know enough about the industry to do anything more than buy organic,” he says at last, and then just wanders off towards one of the other fires.

“Don’t take it personally,” Alex tells Eli when she catches him looking thrown. “Paul doesn’t really know to end conversations. Walking off is a normal closer for him.”

Eli laughs, scratches at a new mosquito bite on his arm, and Alex finds herself asking more about the farm he mentioned several minutes ago. His parents own a small dairy farm, a barn full of cows and some fields of corn out in northern Idaho. When he was young, he tells her, he used to help his mother with the newborn calves--she was a vet, and sometimes they visited their neighbors to lend a hand.

“I used to go and sit with them,” he says. “Keep the mothers company, feed the calves.”

Alex imagines the warmth, the hot breath and dark, wet eyes. She visited a dairy farm in first grade, had walked through county fair livestock shows, but the cows had always been at a distance, separated by a metal railing. The fire puts a palpable heat on her legs and chest. Her skin will be red tomorrow from the sun and from this alike.

“When I got to hold the newborns, I always thought they were the most beautiful things on the planet,” Eli murmurs.

The odd and tender urge to hold his hand rises in Alex. She kicks his foot instead, and some of his seriousness lifts as he smiles down at the sandy dirt.

“Did it ever make you sad?” she asks.

“A lot of things have made me sad,” Eli says. “You’ll have to be specific.”

“Knowing what would happen to them later.” Alex holds her breath, releases it. “Eating them.”

He laughs. “I’ve been a vegetarian since I was six.”

“Ah.”

“God knows,” he says, holding the marshmallow stick in the fire until it starts to turn to ash, “I loved them enough to eat them. Metaphorically.”

Alex nods like that makes sense. In a way it does. She thinks of her parents reading her to sleep, of her father pretending to growl as he grabbed her shoulders-- _I’ll eat you up I love you so_. Suddenly, she wishes she was drunk like the rest of the interns and executives. Drunk people are supposed to be maudlin and half in love with everyone they meet.

“Sorry,” Eli says after a moment, after Alex lets herself get tangled up in her unkempt thoughts. “Sometimes I can ramble.”

“It’s fine,” she assures him. The hot huge warmth of the fire rests on her front and she gives in enough to reach out and put her hand on his arm; she gives in enough to think about birth instead of death for a while. “It makes for a good story. You tell it well.”

Eli ducks his head, raises his beer, and they toast the fire and the forest and the vastly starred sky.  

* * *

 

Alex goes hiking with Nic again, a month after his second disappearance and four days after she once again wakes up from that recurring dream where he’s dead. He brings his dog and she darts down the trail ahead of them and then back again. They stop for water and a snack, and Rita lays her damp nose on Alex’s knee until Alex scratches her ears.

There are burrs caught in her tail and up her legs. Alex wipes her suddenly muddy hands on a leaf.

“Give her a treat. She hasn’t tried to kill anything yet,” Nic says before he steps off the trail to relieve himself.

“Do that often?” Alex asks Rita once Nic is out of earshot. “I can’t imagine you eating anything more lively than a Milkbone.”

Rita noses her leg but doesn’t answer, and Alex fishes a biscuit out of Nic’s backpack for her. They make it almost a third of the way around the lake before they have to turn back for the sunset.

Alex’s shirt is drenched in sweat. She kicks her shoes off and unpacks their food while Nic sets up his hammock. They sit and swing and pass the food and a joint between themselves while the sun sets all the way. Nic likes to talk shit while he’s high, and so Alex ends up being regaled by gossip about the interns for the better part of an hour.

By then she’s so tired her shoulders refuse to unslouch. She crawls into Nic’s tent. It’s ancient, a lurid cathedral devoted to the neon nylon of the nineties. Nic zips their sleeping bags together against the mild chill, and they lay in the darkness with the sound of Rita’s huffing breath.

“Sometimes I wonder how you can still enjoy the woods,” Alex says.

Nic pauses in carefully untangling her hair, but doesn’t move her head off his shoulder. She feels him shrug after a moment, and his fingers tease her knotted split ends apart while he elaborates: “Sometimes I wonder how you can still enjoy ghost stories. Or music. Or having any conversation longer than five minutes with Dr. Strand.”

“Point taken,” Alex mumbles. His hand moves back to her scalp, and the soft heat of the tent has her drowsy all at once.

Nic comes up with something off-topic to talk about, something about a movie he saw with Geoff last week. Alex starts to open her mouth and make sure he knows how much of a date that _totally_ was, but the motion is too slow in coming.

She falls asleep to the smell of wet dog and cedarwood cologne.

They take to the trails again the next day when it’s still early enough for the light on the lake to be blinding pink. The air turns to soup before ten and Alex can’t seem to push herself any harder than a strolling pace. Rita chases a squirrel down a steep incline and by the time Alex and Nic find a safe path down, she’s splashing around the shallows of the lake.

Nic laughs and leans down to dig a tennis ball out of his pack to throw for her.

“You wanna go in?” He asks Alex. His arm cocks back and whips the ball down the bank towards the mouth of a tiny stream.

“Maybe.” Alex stretches her arms overhead until her shoulders pop. “It’s pretty bright out today. Think I can pick up a tan?”

“You can try,” Nic says. His smile is crooked and in the next moment his shirt is off, tossed across his pack in the grass. “But I’ve seen your family’s vacation pictures. Save your lobster impression for Halloween.”

“Rude.”

“Still true.”

“We can’t all be a bronzed Adonis.” Alex sticks her tongue out at the same moment he does. She takes her shirt off anyway, lying back in the grass in her sports bra and shorts. The sun on her skin bumps her from sweating to soaked in only a few minutes.

“You’re gonna get a dad tan if you keep your shoes and socks on,” Nic calls.

Alex flips him off.

They end up swimming anyway, or at least kicking around the edges of the lake until the cool water gets warm in the sun. Alex wades in til the water hits the bottom of her shorts and scoops handfuls of water up her pink arms.

The two of them sprawl out on the bank to dry in the hot sunshine.

“Remember when your hair was long?” Alex asks, reaching out to tug on the bits that hang down past Nic’s ear.

“Remember when your hair was short?” he says.

“Them were the days,” Alex sighs.

“We looked pretty good then.”

They’re eating dinner later, dangling their four tired feet off the edge of a boulder, when Nic turns to her and says: “I have scissors in my bag.”

“For what?”

“Cutting all your hair off. Duh.”

She laughs it off and frisbee-tosses a cracker at him. Rita snatches it up when it falls to the ground, and Nic sighs while she crunches it up.

“So I’ve been hearing some things,” Nic says a little later, vague enough that Alex immediately assumes he’s going to dig right into something nasty--her lackluster performance in the studio, how she’s been covertly wearing the same four articles of clothing for the past three weeks, or worse, the _thing_ between her and Strand.

“Yeah?” she asks anyway.

The sun is just beginning to sink into the top of the forest on the other side of the lake. Alex flips her shades down onto her nose.

“Mm-hmm.” Nic digs in his pack for his notebook, the joint hanging in his mouth until Alex plucks it out and takes a hit. “The internet’s going crazy about some sightings around the Puget Sound.”

Alex coughs. “Sightings of what?”

“That’s the question,” Nic says, putting on his narrator-of-a-mystery-podcast voice. It’s the same as his regular voice, but with additional pauses that are supposed to add suspense.

Nic’s journals have always been haphazard, and this newest one’s no exception. He has pictures taped onto nearly every page, cramped writing filling in the spaces between. His web bibliography has to be a complete mess.

“This is the clearest pictures anyone’s managed to get of it,” he tells her, holding the book open and pointing to a hazy, zoomed-in picture of… something. Something is vaguely humanoid, but stretched out in weird ways. Bony and mottled, maybe hairless. It’s hard to tell.

“What the fuck?” Alex mutters, and starts laughing.

Nic’s forehead wrinkles. She backpedals.

“Sorry, sorry, it just like…” Alex scrambles for a comparison. “Looks like it was taken with a flip phone at Coachella. Some washed out creepy white kids tripping in the desert who left the flash on.”

He does laugh at that, doesn’t even needle her for saying “white kids” like she isn’t one.

“Well, unlike most Coachella attendees, this thing is potentially connected to some maulings around the Central Basin of the Sound.”

“The Central Basin,” she repeats. “Like… Seattle? Like where we’re camping?”

Nic nods, his smile not fading in the least.

“Is that why we’re out here?” Alex half-shouts. “Hunting fucking chupacabras or--or whatever?” She takes a compulsive drag before she can think better of being blazed in the same woods as something that’s tearing hikers to pieces.

“Uh, no,” Nic scoffs. “I’m not a bigfoot hunter, Alex! This is just some spooky shit from the internet that hopefully, for once, will have nothing to do with Tanis.”

He goes quiet, in the sullen way he used to when Alex joked about the dumb things he liked. In the silence, she passes him the joint. They never really got the hang of smoking etiquette.

“It doesn’t even look like a chupacabra,” Nic says a minute later. “Wrong place, wrong size, wrong color.”

Alex doesn’t have anything to contribute.

“It’s closest to a skinwalker. Maybe a small rake.”

“You know I have no idea what either of those are, right?” Alex says, as much of an apology as a way to keep Nic talking about something that isn’t depressing or related to “ancient” “”mythology””.

And his face lights up like she knew it would, and he flips through his notebook like she knew he would, and as her limbs go fuzzy he shows her maps and artist renditions. Like she knew he would.

He tells her about Alabama and California and South America and the overlap in Native American legends and modern first-hand accounts. His voice is radio-smooth and rarely stumbling, and Alex loves the light in his face just as much as she did years ago.

She decides to try harder to be who she is, too. To bring her light back in bits and pieces, or tell some of her own piecemeal stories.

And since she has no paper to write that down on, she promptly forgets it in favor of laughing in disgust as Nic reads off a list of things that skinwalkers allegedly smell like.

* * *

 

Strand needs to get out of the house more.

“You need to get out of the house more,” Alex tells him.

He puts down the research paper he’s been staring seriously at for the past hour and stares seriously at her instead.

“I’m out of the house right now,” he says.

“And in my apartment. Doing research work. _Huge_ improvement.”

“Would it be better if I was doing research for personal reasons?”

“Yes, she sighs, drinking deeply from her glass of wine. She wishes it was a can of beer. “At least then we’d be ten abstractions deep into an innocent Google search about--I don’t know, obscure paranormal research about the Space Needle, and not an ancient serpentine goddess.”

Strand frowns.

“There isn’t a wealth of paranormal literature about the Space Needle. It’s only fifty-five years old.”

“ _Not_ my point.”

“Actually, I’m almost certain that I read something a few years ago about a popular theory in conspiracist circles. Something about it being built by extraterrestrials as an alien transmitter.”

Alex stares at him, dumbfounded until she recognizes the slight crease of the laugh lines by his mouth that always gives his jokes away.

"I almost believed you," she says. His glass is empty, so she fills the heavy silence by filling his cup.

"As far as I know, nobody's come forward with a thesis about the Space Needle. Yet."

"If they did, they'd probably call the station first. We got about a hundred emails after the Axis Mundi debacle."

Strand leans back in his chair and drinks. "That's good, right? Added publicity?"

"Doesn't add up to much when your publicity is just a full inbox of people sending you prayers and warnings."

He nods, and the silence becomes heavy again. Alex leans forward to close her notebook and pick her glass up again. She appreciates the nice wine, even though she knows that Strand knows that she would've been as satisfied with a ten-dollar bottle.

"Seriously, though," she says. "No more work for tonight. Even if you don't need a break, I do. It's _Friday_ , Richard."

"Reasonable enough." Strand rolls his sleeves up as she stacks the books and journals and maps that have lived on her kitchen table for nearly six months now. "What would you like to do?"

"Right now," Alex sighs, "All I wanna do is sit on the balcony and get drunk."

Strand stands and picks up the bottle of wine in one hand, their two glasses in the other. He motions with them and waits for her to lead the way, and follows her out her sliding glass door.

The air is thick but still warm. She wishes they'd caught the sunset. Summer is fading fast and the tan she's picked up on hikes and walks around the sunnier parts of town will fade too. Alex stretches the kink out of her neck while Strand pours her another glass of wine and sits down on the wicker couch.

Alex turns to look at him again, her back to the balcony railing. It rained for a little while earlier today, and the canvas overhang drips slowly onto her outstretched hand. He looks a little younger in the soft light, but the relaxed slope of his shoulder is true. Recent but true.

She goes to sit next to him. Just their knees are touching, and her fingers brush his when he hands over her glass.

A familiar feeling rises in her stomach: The urge to dig in, to know everything about Strand. It's colored differently now, all feeling and no professional curiosity. Maybe some professional curiosity. But now Alex wants to keep all the information to herself, to have a little section of her mind dedicated to Richard Strand, 19xx-now. It's a small collection of information now, a mismatched encyclopedia of taste in wine and grave childhood trauma and the deep wounds that remain when the ones we love betray us.

And instead of asking: _what do you really believe?_ or _how did it feel to watch your mother die?_ or _do you hate your father? really hate him?_ she shifts to face him and asks: "Do you like to go camping?"

Strand raises his eyebrows, mild confusion making him smile. "I haven't been in a while, but yes. I went frequently in college, and fell out of the habit as work took precedent."

"Me too," Alex sighs. "I try to go with Nic at least twice a year, but it's hard to swing a longer trip now."

"It's difficult to talk yourself into a trip when you'd be going alone," Strand adds. The implication falls heavily into the conversation.

Alex slides in closer, her shoulder bumping up against his.

"We could go sometime," she suggests on impulse. "I've got a pretty big tent, and somehow I've ended up with several sleeping bags.

"That--" Strand hesitates. Alex moves her free hand down to grip his. "That would be nice."

"Let's do it then. Sometime before it starts snowing, at least. I know a spot near the Sound that doesn't take too long to get to."

He looks at her for a moment, unreadable, and she stifles the urge to backpedal. Suddenly it feels clear that she wants to take him camping, wants to bring some part of his life back and make it hers.

It's not a jealous feeling, somehow, even though she feels like it should be, but mostly Alex wants the normalcy. Driving out to the woods with a boyfriend and camping for the weekend. Waking up early and hiking through the hills near the lake and falling into their pile of sleeping bags together at night and packing up at the end of the weekend and driving home only to see each other at work throughout the week so she can smile, remembering the trip and enjoying the feeling of having a harmless secret.

Alex sets her glass of wine down and slides over into his lap. His shoulder is warm under her cheek. Strand rests his hands on her back and she closes her eyes against the light fading out from her living room.

"I'm having a hard time picturing you next to a campfire," she admits finally, and his chest shakes as he laughs.

"I only went camping a few times before college," Strand says. "Wayne's family took me when they could.”

Alex waits, feeling the rise and fall of his breathing.

"We went to Allegheny in the summers--in southern New York. His family rented a spot in one of the campsites there, and we would go around the fourth of July." Strand's hand strokes the small of her back and up towards her shoulders. "They had a camper, it was probably too small for six people to stay in, but Wayne and Wesley and I slept outside in a tent when the weather was good."

He laughs again, and Alex pulls one of his hands around into her lap.

"His parents let us ride in the trailer the whole way north," Strand explains. Alex doesn't have to look at him to know that he's smiling. "His little sister had to ride in the car with their parents but we could lay on the couches and play cards--and fall over every time the car turned too fast."

Alex smiles, thinks about her uncle teaching her poker on a tree stump outside their cabin--he used to drive her to the grocery store in town to pick up pop and s’mores supplies and never made her wear her seatbelt.

"I stopped going after my mother became sick. She wanted me to keep going, but I didn't want to leave her at home alone. Carol was still young, and I… I knew how to take care of her."  

His hands tighten for a moment, and Alex feels the reined-in sadness like a tangible presence. She waits, again.

"I'm sorry you lost her," she says finally.

"I am too," Strand says.

They sit like that until Alex's back twinges. When she sits up in his lap he looks at her like he does when he hasn't seen her in weeks, a restrained excitement and fondness that makes her warm up immediately. Alex leans up to kiss him, holds onto the bumpy wicker couch to shift herself higher, and Strand holds her there against him.

It's warm, still. Warm enough that after a few minutes the humidity has her hair sticking to her forehead and the back of her neck.

She breaks off to put her hair up and take a long look at Strand out of the corner of her eye. With his sleeves rolled up and his hair mussed she has that thought again: he looks young.

But mostly he looks familiar.

"You wanna go inside?" she asks, tying her lopsided bun into place.

They go inside. Alex puts their glasses in the sink and wipes down the counter while Strand packs his things. It’s colder inside, like all the warmth left over from the day has finally gone. Alex fiddles with the things on her dining room table and thinks about the sleepless night ahead of her.

“You don’t have to go,” she blurts out finally, as Strand fastens the buckle on his bag.

He looks up. She can’t read his expression, but he takes his car keys out of his pocket and puts them on the table next to hers.

And so she braids her hair in the mirror above her dresser while he gets changed into some old clothes he left in the hamper weeks ago after they tried--and failed--to fix the ticking in Alex’s car engine.

Strand borrows her toothbrush since she still hasn’t picked up a spare, and when it’s her turn she stares herself down in her mirror, thinking-- _what_ ? It’s not the first time he’s spent the night, and she’s stayed over at his more than a few times, and the strong potential that they won’t go to sleep immediately is hardly knew, so-- _what_?

Maybe it’s the urge to dissect again, to get further under his skin. She’s gotten this far.

Alex brushes her teeth harder than necessary and spits into the sink and when she locks eyes with herself again she tamps that urge down and whispers: “I don’t want to talk any more tonight.”

It’s mostly true. Saying it out loud makes it more solid for her, and she murmurs it again while she washes her face and dries it. “I don’t want to talk any more tonight.”

So when she goes back out to find him reading in her bed, she climbs into his lap and sets the worn paperback on the nightstand, and… and she lies awake later, watching the eternal furrow in Strand’s brow ease, as it always does, in sleep.

She has time, now, to think about Strand being young and carefree, sharing a beer with Wayne Coates after Mr. and Mrs. Coates had gone to bed, and Wesley drifting off inside the tent.

She has time to think before she falls into a miraculously dreamless sleep.

* * *

 

Alex drives to Strand’s house on a Saturday morning. Her bags are, for once, packed carefully. The sun is shining again and with the windows rolled down, her head finally feels clear.

He’s waiting on the porch with one bag, an old army pack made of faded canvas. It’s huge, and ridiculous.

“Old school,” Alex comments, her smile genuine and strong.

Strand puts the bag in the back and slides into the passenger seat.

“I did say it had been a while.”

“Right,” Alex sighs. Twenty years, she thinks, and decides to forgo killing the mood in favor of handing Strand her CD case.

He gives her a long look as she gets back on the highway and mutters something that sounds like “And I’m old school?”

But he picks David Bowie’s _Changes One_ and turns the volume up a few notches so the music can be heard over the cars and the wind.

It’s not a long drive, barely an hour after they hit a rest stop to stretch and use the bathroom. Alex pulls into a diner around noon, one with a painted sign and handmade curtains. Strand looks more charmed than suspicious, and even lets her pick up the tab for their sandwiches.

She picks an old mix CD from Nic and realizes two songs in that it’s the playlist he made after her last breakup. There are banjos and John Darnielle telling her there’ll be feasting and dancing in Jerusalem next year. Somehow she makes it through “Somebody That I Used to Know” with a straight face, and they pull into a gravel lot at the trailhead just in time to finish “Expo ’86”.

“This is your secret spot?” Strand asks, and ah, _there’s_ the dubious tone she’s been waiting for. Alex rolls her eyes.

“Of course, Richard. We’re pitching a tent for the night in the middle of a parking lot. God forbid we pass the treeline.”

He stifles a smile. They get the bags out of the car, Alex’s dark green tent and sleeping bags and her pack of food, Strand’s canvas bag that slings across his chest and makes him look at odds--like a stuffy mountain man.

“Hold on,” she says before they pass out of the sunshine and into the forest. “I have to get a picture of this.”

Strand pulls a face but doesn’t ask if it’s going on the website.

It’s a good picture. Alex wants to send it to Nic so badly, wants to post it to the Twitter account and her Instagram and send it to the local paper for posterity, but--she knows better.

She should really talk to Nic soon.

It’s a good picture.

“Let’s go,” she says after a long moment of pretending to check her bags.

And they walk.

Alex picks the long, moderately difficult route instead of a short, hard hike. It’s different out here with Strand. There’s no dog bounding forward and back to her, no ridiculous hypothetical conversation, and they’re not drinking or high, but it feels comfortable. Fitting. She can see a next time, and the next time looks good. Strand will drive and she’ll get a chance to critique his music collection and maybe they’ll stop at the same diner and order something new.

The conversation lingers on work for longer than she likes. Alex finds herself filling the silence with comments on the scenery, pointing out different plants and trees and tracks until some of them ring a bell for Strand and he tells her about college and the local mythology he studied.

By mid-afternoon they’re on the low eastern bank of the lake. Strand unpacks their lunches and Alex rolls out a blanket. The sun is hot through the clouds and Alex considers taking her shirt off again--considers talking Strand out of his clothes right here in the open.

But right now she’s more hungry than horny. Lunch smells delicious and, well, there’ll be time for that later, when the sun sets and she lights a small fire and exhaustion melts all the stiffness from their shoulders.

“You keep up pretty well for an old man,” she says, just for something to say as Strand hands her half a sandwich. It’s worth it for the flash of exasperation on his face.

“And you for a radio journalist,” he replies.

Alex feels good in the wake of a big lunch, lying back in the sun to rest.

“Where did you learn so much about the woods?” Strand asks then, spinning an aster between his fingers until the petals blurred. “It hardly seems like your typical specialty.”

“My grandfather,” Alex replies. It comes out easily as she shifts to rest her head against his leg. “He worked in the forests his whole life. I was also a Scout for nearly a decade, even though I didn’t learn much more than he’d already taught me.”

Strand hums, and the gentle grief that comes with thinking about Felix rolls around Alex’s mouth, prickly and nostalgic.

“I still miss him sometimes,” she admits. “Mostly out here.”

“I never knew my grandparents,” Strand says.

“No?”

“My mother’s parents passed when I was too young to remember them, and my father was estranged from his family since college. They weren’t much of a loss. According to my mother, my father’s parents were the kind of rich that didn’t appreciate marrying beneath your class.”

“And your mother was beneath their class?”

“By their standards,” Strand says. “I could never imagine how.”

Alex squeezes his knee and, for a moment, lets herself share in his own practiced mourning. She holds her tongue, thinking about her grandfather’s stories and the hours she spent with him and her grandmother in the woods around their house.

Strand’s hand strokes absently through her loose hair, and then he laughs.

“What?”

“I feel like I’ve been handed a key piece to the Alex Reagan puzzle,” he says. She opens her eyes. His smile isn’t mocking, but fond and honest.

She has reined in so much the past two years, pieces of the truth and of herself, that a bizarre sense of relief washes over her now. It’s not surprising that a gift of emotional intimacy would affect him like this, but seeing the truth of it is still new. Alex can appreciate the quid pro quo of it all.

“What happens when you solve it?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” Strand says, staring off at the water. He looks back down at her and places the aster behind her ear. “I don’t think I’m anywhere close to that.”

They pack their bags again then, starting off on the trail again until they reach the cleared-out spot where the lack of growth still marks where she and Nic built their fire weeks ago. Strand pitches the tent and Alex swaps her hiking shoes for cheap sandals before she goes around collecting dry wood and kindling.

Sunset approaches while they eat a light dinner. Alex instantly commits the image of Strand eating jerky to memory. Her water is lukewarm but refreshing, as is changing out of her sweat-soaked t-shirt and into a hoodie as the air starts to cool. Alex brings out a small bottle of decent whiskey and realizes she forgot the cups, so they drink it straight, and the alcohol slowly warms her

Alex lights the fire before night falls completely, and the conversation turns to the past again. Alex feeds the flames the way Felix showed her decades ago and thinks about going to visit his grave before winter. He’s buried by the lake house with his wife and one of her uncle’s dogs. In the summer, her mother grows sunflowers by their headstones.

“So,” Alex says, when she runs out of things to say about growing up in Vancouver. “I feel like we should be telling ghost stories.”

“I doubt you’d like the ones I have to tell,” Strand says, laughing again. “None of them seem to satisfy you when the twist is that there was never a ghost at all.”

“Fair enough. But you must have some open-ended ones. They don’t have to be from the tapes, just the kind of thing you and your friends might tell each other on a night like this. Escaped convicts with hook hands, ghosts in the attic…”

“I’d expect you to have more stories like that.”

“I have a lot of stories,” Alex says. “But without a script they tend to come out sounding like episodes of The X Files. Bad ones, too--more like, like _Teso Dos Bichos_ than _Two Fathers_.”

“A storyteller who can’t tell stories,” Strand says. His tone is ambiguous but he passes her the bottle when he says it so she decides not to take it personally.

“I have scripts now, which helps. And my grandfather wrote all of his down for me.”

“Were they any good?”

Alex traces the lip of the bottle with her thumb. “When I was ten, they were the best I’d ever heard.”

“Do you remember any of them?” Strand asks. He reaches out with a heavy stick to rearrange the fire. In the sudden glow, he looks thoughtful.

“A few,” she says. She takes a drink and waits before she asks: “Do you want to hear one?”

“Sure.” He says it like he wasn’t angling for it, and Alex has gotten used to that, too. Neither of them are very good at asking for what they want.

Alex moves closer so that the wind isn’t blowing smoke directly into her face, and so that when she folds her legs their knees are touching.

“You’ve heard of, uh, of the wendigo, right?”

“I have,” Strand says.

“The Chenoo?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

Alex looks at her hands and smiles. The fire is warm at her feet. Strand’s shoulder is a solid weight against hers.

When she reaches for the beginning, for the opening sentence, she can hear it in Felix Reagan’s voice. She’s in the woods outside his house. She’s sitting on a handmade wooden bench, wrapped in an afghan knitted by her grandmother, leaning forward over another, bigger fire to hear every detail. To watch his face as he gives her something precious: a part of himself. The stories from the Mi’kmaq and from the forests--the Chenoo, the Partridge Wife, the horned serpent. The fae things that lived in the trees.

And Alex is here, now, in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, far south of the Canadian border. The fire is hot and the air is cool and she can smell cedarwood cologne on the collar of her station sweatshirt.

Strand watches her face as she gives him a part of herself.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> uh, hey, so this is a thing I started writing in January as a pinch-hit for the hellatus swap. 
> 
> and then it got out of hand and took me four+ months to write and ended up being 10k of backstory and headcanons as for why Alex is who she is. 
> 
> the stories her grandfather tells are taken from Mi'kmaq legends and stories from Newfoundland logging camps during that era.


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